Various designs of cabinets exist for containing and holding telecommunications apparatus coupled to telephone field cables. Such cabinets are generally metal housings which provide a protective enclosure for feeder distribution interfaces in varied plant applications. To establish an interface between feeder and distribution cables, a number of buried cables, of up to four inches in diameter, are brought up through a concrete pad or foundation and into the bottom of the cabinet. Independent transmission conductors are then electrically connected into cross connect blocks housed in the cabinet. The particular arrangement of the connections within the cross connect blocks allows numerous communication lines to be established, thereby providing selectively controlled communications service via distribution cables throughout a desired local.
Due to the nature of the electrical connections made within the cabinet, certain environmental elements often adversely affect the communications circuit created. Excessive moisture is a common problem which often develops within telecommunications cabinets or enclosures.
In addition to rain, the most obvious type of external moisture, the evaporation of ground water may also introduce undesired moisture into the telecommunications equipment. In particular, various types of pedestal or ground-mounted cabinets presently used lack adequate structural mechanisms to prohibit moisture from rising out of the ground and into the cabinet. Due to the completely enclosing nature of conventional cabinets, evaporating ground moisture becomes entrapped within the cabinet with no simple and efficient manner of removing the moisture from the cabinet. Even though a variety of louver arrangements have been used to facilitate removal of excess moisture from the cabinets, such arrangements have not adequately alleviated the problem.
A common point of entrance for such ground moisture into the cabinets is through various openings which may exist around the cables at their initial entry point into the cabinet. Existing prior art cabinets have included flexible rubber boots as a means to close any gaps around the cables at their point of entry into the cabinet. However, such boots require a substantial number of elements to be properly installed and are therefore rather cumbersome to use in the field. Furthermore, the flexible boots often have a stepped tapered configuration, with each step sized to receive a cable having a particular outer diameter. Therefore, to install the flexible boot, portions of the boot must be cut away and discarded in order to appropriately receive the selected cable. Such manipulation of the boot is burdensome and time consuming for an operator installing a cable entrance seal to a cabinet.
In light of the above-identified problems with the present technology, what is needed and what seemingly is not provided by the prior art is a durable and easy-to-install cable entrance seal. Furthermore, the sought-after cable entrance seal should require only a minimal number, if any, separate parts to be properly installed. Still further, the sought-after cable entrance seal should be bifurcated so as to allow the seal to be easily installed around a cable having no free end for the seal to slide over.